The history of the housing project “Metsenat” is complicated and unique in many respects. The idea of building something imposing in the stead of the former Soviet can factory, east of the famous Kadashi Resurrection Church, has been around for quite a while, at least since the 2000’s. Originally, the housing complex was called “Pyat Stolits” (“The Five Capitals”). 2009 saw the demolition of the factory buildings – and the project immediately caused a lot of public concern, both on the side of the parish, headed by the dean of the department of the devotional art of the St.Tikhon’s Orthodox University, the Father Superior, Alexander Saltykov, and on the side of the preservation group Arkhnadzor. The problem was best of all described by Alexander Mozhaev. It seems that nobody actually saw the project itself, yet the visualization of its buildings, five to six stories high (not thirty-five stories, it must be noted, to do the project justice), encircling the masterpiece of architecture of the late XVII century, the gem of Zamoskvorechye, went all over the press. While there is nothing new about this situation as such, what did come as a surprise was the fact that back in 2010 the then- Moscow Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, halted the “Five Capitals” project. In the end of April of the same year, the city council was already considering a new proposal, which stayed within the confines of the so-called “regeneration” strategy consisting in restoring the city fabric without introducing any significant changes. The height of the buildings dropped from 5-6 floors down to 2-3, the overall area shrinking to about a third of the original size. In 2013, it became known that the project was further developed by Ilia Utkin, who back in 2011 was invited “to do the facades”; later on, however, the client commissioned the architect with the entire project.

The final project was supported by the local preservation activists, and in 2015 it passed the examination by the chief architect of Moscow, Sergey Kuznetsov.

This story is amazing in every respect: from the cancellation of the project by the mayor to the unexpected approval thereof – it turns out that one side does realize that building large-scale monsters next to a monument of architecture is an atrocity, yet it sort of does not fully realize it, while the other side agrees that something needs to be built here, all the more so because, when the scandal broke out, some of the apartments in this high-end residential complex in the center of Moscow were already sold (one cannot say that all of the problems were solved at once – Father Superior Alexander Saltykov continued his struggle against the construction as such, yet still, there was some sort of a ceasefire; see the interview with Ilia Utkin). The solution of the situation seemed to be the perfect, almost exemplary one. Since that time, there were a lot of changes, hopes, and disappointments; one could say that Moscow’s preservation of monuments has been through a very difficult decade with a beginning, a middle, and an end. As for the complex that caused so much controversy back in the day, it was finally completed last year – currently, they are cleaning up the land around it, liberally decorating it with various plants. We visited Kadashi together with the author of the project, Ilia Utkin, a convinced traditionalist, a “paper” architect, and a person who got an award of the Venice Architecture Biennale for a series of photos of ruins – and examined the end result. 

We enter the complex from the north, from the 2nd Kadashevsky Lane; or from the west, from the 1st – the new housing complex encircles the Kadashi Resurrection Church with its corner, following its main street: almost in the middle, it makes a 90-degree turn, which forms a small plaza lying before the main preserved and restored monument of architecture, the Olenev Chambers, which still keep the vaults of the XVII and XVIII centuries.